Semester IV Course Description 2023
M.A. in English – Semester IV
Assignments and Course Description 2023
University of Kalyani
[Subject to the approval of the PG Board of Studies in English]
COR 410 --TWENTIETH CENTURY: FICTION AND NON-FICTIONAL PROSE
Unit I Fiction (at least two authors) Unit II Non-fictional prose (at least two
authors)
Sub-unit One novel or five short STM Sub-unit I One full book-length STM
I stories text or three essays
Sub-unit One novel or five short STM Sub-unit One full book-length STM
II stories II text or three essays
COR 411 -- LITERARY CRITICISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
Unit I Literary Criticism (at least two authors) Unit II Schools of Criticism
Sub-unit One book-length text or IR Sub-unit I Any three schools IR
I three essays
Sub-unit One book-length text or IR Sub-unit Any three schools IR
II three essays II
DSE 406 -- FILM AND LITERATURE: ADAPTATION AND THEORY
Unit I Film Adaptation of European & Unit II Film Adaptation of Asia-Pacific &
American Texts African Texts
Sub-unit Any three texts and their KB Sub-unit I Any three texts and KB
I film adaptation their film adaptation
Sub-unit One book length text or KB Sub-unit One book length text KB
II three essays on theory of II or three essays on
film theory of film
DSE 407 -- WOMEN’S WRITING: LITERATURE AND THEORY
Unit I Literature (at least two authors) Unit II Theory and Criticism (at least
two authors)
Sub-unit One novel or five short stories DS Sub- 17 and 18th Century DS
I unit I
Sub-unit Poetry (One long poem or three DS Sub- 19th Century to the DS
II mid-length poems or ten short unit II present
poems) or Drama (one full-length
play or three one-act plays)
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
DSE 408 -- NEW GENDER STUDIES
Unit I Theories (At least two authors) Unit II Literary Texts and/or Films (At least
two authors/directors)
Sub-unit One book length text or NRC Sub-unit I One novel or five short NRC
I three essays stories or three films
Sub-unit One book length text or NRC Sub-unit II One novel or five short NRC
II three essays stories or three films
COR 410 -- TWENTIETH CENTURY: FICTION AND NON-FICTIONAL PROSE
Unit I. Sub-unit I. Fiction Sagar Taranga Mandal
Course Content: Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
Course Description: The course seeks to understand Golding‟s text in the context of the
forces that go into the making of a human society. How for instance, or to what extent
violence could be implicated in the foundation of a society? How violence and the lust for
power are “constitutive” of both the state and the society? Again, could we see Golding‟s text
as a locus of the Simmelian “socializing conflicts” providing us roles or prototypes for social
behaviour? To what extent the text mirrors the anxiety evoked by what could be seen as a
civilizational crisis? What are the forms, in addition to literary expressions, such a crisis
assumes? Besides probing these phenomena as central to Lord of the Flies, the lectures
intended for this course will also look into the diverse themes populating this novel, like
intertextuality, classical myths, and symbolism, redirecting our focus into the complex
connections between psychology and material reality.
Unit I. Sub-unit II. Fiction Sagar Taranga Mandal
Course Content: Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
Course Description: Each Dubliner story sets its own tone and deals with its own particular
issues, but there are moments in the volume where Joyce begins to approach techniques he
developed and employed with far greater persistence in later works. The course will explore
these narrative techniques, and seek to understand how such narrative experiments are bound
up with the author‟s moral and aesthetic design. Hence, the consideration would not be
merely to view Dubliners as a step towards a more prolific creative oeuvre, but to situate the
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
text within a culturally and politically productive phase in Joyce. As a text to be studied and
analysed, Dubliners presents the student with an array of interesting questions. What is
Joyce‟s attitude to Dublin and Ireland? Is he sick of it? Or is he obsessed and enchanted by it?
What are the epiphanies, or revelations of truth in Dubliners, and what roles do they play?
How does Joyce use symbols? Are Joyce‟s stories offering political views? Besides
addressing these questions, the course plans to locate the text in the midst of the search for a
cultural revival that was central to both Joyce and his contemporaries.
The unit intends to look at the following short stories from Dubliners:
„The Sisters‟, „A Painful Case‟, „Clay‟, „Eveline‟, „The Boarding House‟, „The Dead‟
Unit II. Sub-unit I. Non-fictional Prose Sagar Taranga Mandal
Sub-unit-1: Select essays from V.S Naipaul‟s Literary Occasions
„Reading and Writing‟
„East Indian‟
„Conrad‟s Darkness and Mine‟
The course would carry out an enquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction
in particular. Situating Naipaul at the very centre of such an exploration, it would recover the
vital links between self-knowledge, memory and literary endeavour. The engagement would
also look at the evolving relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and
identities.
Unit II. Sub-unit II. Non-fictional Prose Sagar Taranga Mandal
Select essays from Salman Rushdie‟s Step Across This Line
„Influence‟
„Crash‟
„On Being Photographed‟
Suggested themes for discussion:
1. The craft and design of fiction
2. The politics of seeing
3. Semiotics of vision
4. Borders and barriers
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
COR 411 -- LITERARY CRITICISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
Unit I. Sub-unit I. Ishita Roy
Course Content:
i. Walker Gibson. “Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers”, College English Vol. 11, No. 5
ii. Stanley Eugene Fish. “Is There a Text in This Class?”, Chapter 13, Is There a Text in This
Class?:The Authority of Interpretative Communities
iii. Wolfgang Iser. “The Reading Process: a phenomenological approach” From Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader
Unit I. Sub-unit II Ishita Roy
Course Content:
i. Ania Loomba. “Introduction” & Selected Excerpts from Colonialism/Postcolonialism
ii. Marcus E.Green. “Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci‟s
concept of the subaltern” from Rethinking Gramsci
iii. Arun P. Mukherjee. “The Exclusions of Postcolonial Theory and Mulk Raj Anand‟s
Untouchable: A Case Study” from Postcolonialism: My Living
Unit II. Sub-unit I. Schools of Criticism Ishita Roy
Course Content:
1. Reader-Response Theory
2. Structuralism
3. Post-Structuralism
Unit II. Sub-unit II. Schools of Criticism Ishita Roy
Course Content:
1. Postcolonial Theory
2. Subaltern Studies
3. Dalit Studies
DSE 406 -- FILM AND LITERATURE: ADAPTATION AND THEORY
Unit I. Sub-unit I. Film Adaptation of European & American Texts Kuntal Bag
Course Content:
1. Baz Lurhman- Romeo and Juliet (1996) [based on William Shakespeare‟s Romeo and
Juliet]
2. Bernardo Bertolucci-Il Conformista (1970) [based on Il Conformista (1951)by
Alberto Moravia]
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
3. Francis Ford Coppola- Apocalypse Now (1979) [based on The Heart of Darkness
(1899)by Joseph Conrad]
Unit I. Sub-unit II. Theory of Film and Adaptation Kuntal Bag
Course Content:
1. „Defining the terms‟ (What is Adaptation? What is Appropriation?) [Adaptation and
Appropriation (2007) by Julie Sanders, Routledge new Critical Idiom Series]
2. „Dickens, Griffith and The Film Today‟ [ Film Form, Essays in Film Theory (1977)
by Sergei Eisenstein, Ed. & Trans. Jay Leyda, Harvest/HBJ]
3. „Trying Harder: Probability, Objectivity and Rationality in Adaptation Studies‟ [The
Literature/Film Reader, Issues of Adaptation (2007), ed. James M. Welsh & Peter Lev, the
Scarecrow Press, Inc.]
Unit II. Sub-unit I. Film Adaptation of Asia-Pacific & African Texts Kuntal Bag
1. Danny Boyle- Slumdog Millionaire (2008) [based on Q&A (2005) by Vikas Swarup]
2. Mira Nair- The Namesake (2006) [based on The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri]
3. Govin Hood – Tsotsi (2005) [based on Tsotsi: A Novel by Athol Fugard] or Marwan
Hamed-The Yacoubian Building(2006) [based on The Yacoubian Building (2002) by
Alaa Al Aswany]
Unit II. Sub-unit II. Theory of Film and Adaptation Kuntal Bag
1. „Introduction: The Screenplay and Authorship in Adaptation‟ [Authorship in Film
Adaptation (2008) ed. Jack Boozer, University of Texas Press]
2. „What‟s in a Name? Or, Something like an Introduction‟ [Shakespeare, Film Studies
and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (2008)by Anthony R. Guneratne, Palgrave Macmillan]
3. Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5 [A Theory of Adaptation (2006)by Linda Hutcheon,
Routledge]
DSE 407 -- WOMEN’S WRITING: LITERATURE AND THEORY
Unit I. Sub-unit I. Prose Dhrubajyoti Sarkar
The Golden Notebook. Dorris Lessing. 1962.
[For focus topics and direction of discussion refer to the teaching website mentioned below]
Unit I. Sub-unit II. Poetry or Drama Dhrubajyoti Sarkar
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
Three Sisters. Anton Chekhov. 1900-01 [Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov’s
Selected Plays translated by Laurence Senelick. 2004]
Unit II. Sub-unit I Theory & Criticism: 17th& 18th century Dhrubajyoti Sarkar
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft. [Any edition will
do as long as it is complete and unabridged]
Unit II. Sub-unit II Theory & Criticism: 19th century to the present
Dhrubajyoti Sarkar
A Room of One’s Own. Sections Two, Five and Six. (1928-29) Virginia Woolf.
A detailed course-plan and reading lists to accompany each class and assignment/
assessments will be available athttps://sites.google.com/klyuniv.ac.in/courses-
taught/homeduring teaching weeks
The course will use https://www.remind.com/as the official channel of
communication for the course. Class code will be shared with the class during
teaching weeks. Should a student face difficulty in accessing the app/ website; she
should contact the instructor right at the beginning of course for an alternative mode.
DSE 408 -- NEW GENDER STUDIES
Unit I. Sub-Unit I Niladri Ranjan Chatterjee
Course content:
“The Perverse Implantation” from History of Sexuality Vol.1 by Michel Foucault
“Sex/Gender/Desire” from Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
“Complicating Gender: Rights of Transsexuals in India” by Ashwini Sukthankar
from Because I Have a VoiceEd. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan
Unit I. Sub-Unit II Niladri Ranjan Chatterjee
Course content:
“Introduction: Ancient Indian Materials”
“Introduction: Medieval Materials”
“Introduction: Perso-Urdu Materials” from Same-Sex Love in India Ed. Ruth Vanita
and Saleem Kidwai
Unit II. Sub-Unit I Niladri Ranjan Chatterjee
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Semester IV Course Description 2023
Course Content: Maurice by E. M. Foster
Unit II. Sub-Unit II. Niladri Ranjan Chatterjee
Course content:
Moonlight (2016) Dir. Barry Jenkins
Margharita with a Straw (2014) Dir. Sonali Bose, Nilesh Maniyar
Transamerica (2005) Dir. Duncan Tucker
Course Description: The novel and the films will be discussed along the axes of
gender, sexuality, culture, disability, and race.
The course hopes to challenge as many of the numerous normativities that congeal to
create the “male”, the “female”, and the “trans” as possible. Through an engagement
with theory and fictional narratives, the course hopes to understand how language
creates identities that are difficult to neatly separate from one another. The course will
seek to understand how terms marking gendered categories both liberate and imprison
our efforts to think about identity. It also hopes to understand how gender studies, in
order to be effective as knowledge production, has to be intersectional.
DISSERTATION PAPER (Classroom Lectures by Niladri R. Chatterjee)
The Classroom lectures will consist of teaching how to write a research paper
following the MLA Style Sheet 9th Edition. Students will be taught not only how to
form a research question but also how to arrange the information and analysis in a
paper. In addition to this the students will be taught how to compose a Work Cited
List and/or a Bibliography.
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